


Cast and Bind

by DivineProjectZero



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Domestic, Knitlock, Knitting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 20:49:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1361320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DivineProjectZero/pseuds/DivineProjectZero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Are you knitting?" John enquires.</p><p>Sherlock doesn't even look up to answer. "Astounding deduction, John. What gave it away, the yarn or the two large knitting implements in my hands?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cast and Bind

**Author's Note:**

> I do not have a beta nor do I have anybody to Brit-pick this, so all mistakes and Americanisms are my own.

John walks from his room to the bathroom in the morning and glances at Sherlock seated by the dining table, knitting needles clicking away. He doesn't think much of it until he is rinsing his mouth to rid the taste of toothpaste.

"Are you knitting?" John enquires.

Sherlock doesn't even look up to answer. "Astounding deduction, John. What gave it away, the yarn or the two large knitting implements in my hands?"

By now John is accustomed to Sherlock's sarcasm and his disdain for John's habit of stating the obvious. What John is not accustomed to is the sight of a green, fluffy scarf taking shape as Sherlock's fingers work with alarming speed. It's like he's been perfecting the craft for years.

"You know how to knit," John says. It is not one of his most astute observations. Sherlock just looks up at John with an eyebrow raised. John has never been told by an eyebrow that he is an idiot before.

Sherlock, the great git, is still knitting without missing a stitch while patronizing John with his eyes.

"I thought knitting was something you would have deleted." John is fascinated by how smoothly Sherlock's fingers move. "I don't see how knitting could be related to any of your cases."

"Knitting needles make sufficient murder tools when utilized effectively," Sherlock says and looks back down at his handiwork.

John mulls over the idea of how a knitting needle can be utilized effectively as a murder weapon before deciding that he doesn’t want to know. Then he realises what Sherlock has neatly avoided saying: "But there isn't really a point in actually knitting."

The slow birth of the green scarf pauses before resuming. "It's practical."

"Practical my arse, none of your poncey clothes are handmade. Your scarf is definitely not handmade."

Sherlock doesn't answer, needles clicking ominously as his knitting speed increases to an inhuman level. John decides he needs some tea. And a crossword.

-

John isn't sure what happened to the green scarf, but the next time he catches Sherlock knitting the yarn is navy blue.

"Is that a sock?" John is trying, he really is, but sometimes the obvious questions are the only way to go to preserve his sanity. Sherlock Holmes knitting nice, navy blue socks on the couch like some sort of homemaker with an agenda is not conducive to John preserving his sanity.

"Every time I begin to think that your intelligence might be improving, you have to prove me wrong. " Sherlock's voice is dry as the desert wind. "Why don't you ask me if we're in London next?"

John ignores the jab. Sherlock insulting John's intelligence feels far more normal than all this knitting. All this domesticity is unnerving.

"Are you bored?" John asks nervously, because if knitting is supposed to be some sort of signal, a precursor to some sort of colossal black mood, John wants to be prepared. Perhaps the socks are a SOS signal that John has yet to decipher and is a sign that the apocalypse is approaching. He doesn't want to see if Sherlock can efficiently utilize knitting needles as weapons. The man probably knows how to kill people with rubber bands.

"Not yet," Sherlock says, and that feeling of foreboding increases tenfold. John wonders if he should go get his gun.

Sherlock notices. "Relax. Lestrade should be bringing a case in about forty minutes."

He's right. Lestrade comes to 221B saying something about politicians and missing ears, and John feels much better while Sherlock examines a corpse laid out in Regent's Park.

-

This time it's a purple hat right before John is leaving for surgery, and he feels compelled to ask.

"What do you do with those when you’re done?”

Sherlock ties a knot. Says, "I get rid of them."

-

John starts figuring it out during a case.

They're at the morgue. Sherlock is completely absorbed in soil analysis, while Molly is flitting about, providing tidbits of information and attempting one-sided conversations that John feels obligated to respond to in Sherlock's stead.

"It's been chilly these days, so the body didn't decompose as quickly as it would have in room temperature." Molly fishes around in her lab coat pockets for a pen. Her explanation of the blood test results has been tuned out by Sherlock a long time ago, so John has been listening in case any points of interest turn up. He doubts it, though. "We think the approximate time of death is closer to the beginning of the month--"

Molly tugs out a pen and John's attention is riveted on the pink mitten poking out of her coat pocket.

"Sorry," John interrupts, "but where did you get those?"

The flush of pink on Molly's cheeks have nothing to do about the cold outside. "Oh, these?" She smiles and John can't smile back. "Sherlock gave them to me."

Of course, because John remembers those mittens. He remembers, out of the many knitted items he glimpsed over the past few months, staring at the bright pink yarn in Sherlock's hands before he had beaten a hasty retreat to his room.

"That was nice of him." John thinks of seeing scarves and hats in varying colors, at varying stages of the creative birthing process, and finally begins to build a hypothesis about where exactly those finished products go.

-

Evidence: Mycroft's green scarf.

Evidence: Navy blue socks on Lestrade's feet as a paramedic checks a potentially sprained ankle.

Evidence: Mrs. Hudson's new hat, which had been half-finished a week ago on the kitchen table.

-

John doesn't ask them if they know that what they wear is Sherlock's work, from beginning to finish. He doesn't ask them if they knew Sherlock can knit, is actually bloody good at it, for fear that he'll be looked at like he's insane. In case Sherlock's ability to churn out high-quality knitted goods is a government secret or something.

Mostly, he doesn't ask because somebody might ask him if he hasn't received anything from Sherlock.

In case he's the only one who hasn't.

-

John adjusts the hypothesis after six more weeks because:

Anthea has a familiar black pouch for her Blackberry.

The cap Angelo has on his head used to be in 221B.

Sally Donovan has new gloves.

He recognizes the leg warmers that one of the Homeless Network members is wearing as she hands Sherlock a folded piece of paper.

-

Three weeks after John stared at the homeless informant's legs all the way down Parker Street, his only comfort is that Anderson has definitely not received anything from Sherlock.

It isn't very comforting.

-

It's not that John is jealous of people getting handmade scarves or socks from his supposedly sociopathic flatmate. After all, Sherlock is still Sherlock, and aside from the balls of yarn lying around the flat and the occasional sight of Sherlock calmly knitting away with his back flat on the sofa, John isn't really missing out on anything. Sherlock is still brilliant and mad and reckless, chasing after danger and wildly alive in the face of death and destruction. John still follows Sherlock, gun sometimes tucked in the waistband of his trousers, and loves every minute of the madness.

Who cares about getting a woolly monstrosity of a hat when he has the entirety of Sherlock Holmes to himself?

John isn't jealous _at all._

-

"Could you teach me?"

Sherlock glances up from his new project, a plush-looking scarf of turquoise and black, and sees John holding up a ball of charcoal grey yarn. The git promptly looks back down and goes back to knitting.

"John, I'm relatively sure that not even you could go wrong with youtube tutorials."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, but it's easier to have a friend see my work and correct me than to have me try to imitate a video and then puzzle over what went wrong three stitches ago."

The grey yarn is held out like an offering. Sherlock sighs and takes it.

-

"You need more than one ball of yarn for a scarf, John."

"...Right. I'll go buy some more tomorrow."

-

John begins with casting on his stitches by following the youtube video Sherlock directs him to. All is well until the second row.

"It's too tight," John says in dismay.

Sherlock spares him a glance and sighs. "Start over."

"Really?"

"Yes."

After a moment, John undoes his work and begins all over again.

-

"Wait, what's a purl stitch?"

-

Sherlock has finished his own striped scarf by the time John has learned how to both knit and purl. Now there is a ball of pastel orange yarn sitting on Sherlock's lap while the detective supervises John's strained efforts to make his stitches as even as possible.

"No, John. Your stitches are becoming too loose. Make them more snug."

“John. Stop. You missed a stitch five stitches ago.”

“Start over, John.”

John hates himself so, so much.

He has no idea what he was thinking, asking Sherlock for help on this. It's an invitation to mock John mercilessly. They might not have a typical male friendship where they bond over beer and rugby, but they were doing plenty of bonding over corpses and chasing criminals, weren't they? Why did John think they needed to bond over how to create ribbing in scarves?

Living with the world's only consulting detective is wreaking havoc on John's ability to parse what is normal or not.

"It would have been easier for you to use a thicker yarn. Those tend to progress much more quickly." Sherlock is already four rows into his new orange blanket, and John has just finished what seems to be a passable second row for his potential scarf.

Sherlock looks at it.

"You could turn it into a coaster?" He asks without a trace of malice.

It's entirely possible that John will die of shame well before he finishes the damned thing.

-

John never asks Sherlock.

He never asks _who next? D.I. Gregson? Mike Stamford? The boy who delivers our Thai takeaway?_

He never asks _what about me?_

-

They spend four days tracking down a silk smuggler and finally corner the woman at a warehouse in Camberwell. By the time she's in handcuffs, John and Sherlock have mud drying on their trousers all the way up to their thighs and smell rather badly. John is hungry, now that the adrenaline rush is dying down, but there is no way he can go inside any establishment for food after going through all those sewers.

"Oh, no you don't." John says and drags Sherlock from the curb. They are not taking a cab in this state. "We're taking up Greg's offer of that free ride home."

Sherlock can sneer all he wants, but the man is hardly in a fit state to protest. The moment they buckle in and Detective Hopkins starts the car, Sherlock slumps in his seat and dozes off, sixty-something hours of no sleep catching up on him.

Sherlock doesn't wake up when they stop on Baker Street, and it's only the sheer power of Hopkins's intense hero worship and John's army training that allow for the two shorter men to somehow carry the consulting detective up the stairs and deposit him in Sherlock's bedroom. John tries not to stare and make it very obvious that he has never been in here and is fascinated by how normal everything seems. Sherlock's room is tidier than the kitchen. It irks John the tiniest bit.

Hopkins and John are about to leave the room when Sherlock snorts awake and blinks, blearily focusing on Hopkins.

"You." Sherlock then flails, throwing out a hand in the direction of his bedside table. "Take it."

John feels his throat freeze up as Hopkins scoops up the familiar black and turquoise scarf that Sherlock indicated.

"Really, sir?"

Sherlock mumbles a positive response and then flops back to sleep.

Later, as Hopkins skips down the stairs, ecstatic about the gift from his idol, John watches the kettle boil. It's stupid, but this is the first time John has seen the moment when Sherlock gives one of his works to another person. The euphoria of a solved case has evaporated, and there's only a hollow feeling left in John's gut.

-

Sherlock never asks John who the grey scarf is for.

John almost wishes he would, just so he could maybe tell him _it's for me because my best friend can't be arsed to make me one when he's throwing them out for free to half the population of London._

But Sherlock never asks.

-

Sherlock is working on gloves this time, ones without fingers. His needles are clicking away at a sedate pace, much slower than usual, and John is wishing he’d chosen a bloody thicker yarn to make this go faster.

"I still can't believe you finished a blanket while I still have half more of a scarf to go,” John grumbles.

"I've had years of practice. You're a novice. The difference in work speed is only to be expected."

"How many years of practice are we speaking of, anyway?" John still hasn't mastered the skill of multitasking; he can't look at Sherlock's face and knit at the same time.

There's a pause in the needle-clicking, but it resumes smoothly after a few seconds. "Approximately twenty-five."

That makes John stop and look up. "Seriously?"

Sherlock shrugs. He can multitask, unlike John, so his refusal to look at John while talking means either this is an uncomfortable topic or an unimportant one. Maybe both.

"My mother taught it to me. I was a very distracted child and she thought it might help me focus."

"Did it?"

"In a sense."

John thinks that over for a bit. "But you don't knit on a case."

Sherlock concedes the point by tilting his head. “It does not help me focus the way I need to during a case. I need to be at my best, at my sharpest, and knitting is not conducive to that. However, I found that it helps me get rid of the background noise. The static, if you will. It helps quiet things down considerably."

He considers that and nods. "I get it. Knitting helps you get rid of the distractions. It’s your form of meditation.”

"Precisely."

That explains a lot. "So you don't knit to make things, the knitting itself is important to you. The fact that you end up making lots of hats and scarves is a side-effect."

Sherlock hesitates. "Usually."

"Still, with the rate you're going through, don't you end up spending a lot of money on yarn? If you've been doing this the past two and a half decades, Jesus, you could have supplied a small city by now." John tries to count the number of things he's seen Sherlock knit over the course of the ten months they've lived together.

"I didn't knit this much before." Sherlock interrupts John's internal calculations. "I used to produce only one-fifth of the amount I do now, going by a monthly basis."

Which means somehow Sherlock has quintupled his knitting quota recently.

"Since when did you, I don't know, start working towards the Guinness Record for knitting?"

Sherlock doesn't pause to answer this one. "Six months ago."

Around when John had found Sherlock knitting a green scarf at the kitchen table. Nothing special preceded that day, as far as John can tell.

Before John can ask any other questions, Sherlock puts an end to their unofficial bonding conversation and drawls, "And if you keep dithering over that catastrophe you're trying to knit right now, I can assure you that it will take more than six months to finish it."

Tosser.

-

John spends the next three weeks chasing criminals around London, negotiating with Sherlock about how much of the fridge should be used to hold body parts, and knitting between patients at work.

He spends every day in hope.

-

John spends Christmas making a perfunctory call to a sober (and thus very crabby) Harry, studiously avoiding the mistletoe dangling from the entrance to the kitchen, and having dinner with Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson. It's a peaceful way to spend the holiday, and John finds it quite enjoyable. Except for the fact that Sherlock just cannot shut up about how much he despises John's Christmas jumper.

"For the hundredth time, Sherlock, I don't care what you think about my jumpers."

"Of course you don't care; you're not the one who has to constantly look at them! I can feel my eyes being infected by how hideous they are."

The bickering only dies down when Mrs. Hudson shushes them for a gift exchange. She has a pair of concert tickets for Sherlock--a favor from an old friend, she says--who lights up at the name of the orchestra. For John, she has a thick mystery novel that he mentioned not so long ago.

John turns to Sherlock. "I swear, if you deduce the ending of this one to me before I finish it again, I will bin every experiment I find in this flat for the next three months."

He only gets an imperious eye-roll in return.

Which is probably the most he'll get out of the prat, so John turns back to Mrs. Hudson and presents her with a new tea set. He had found it on sale and had decided that it was about time someone replaced the poor kettle Sherlock had ruined last month. Something about boiling human hair and other nightmarish things.

Sherlock's present for Mrs. Hudson is an intricately woven shawl. It's the kind one would expect to see in a shop, or in a magazine, and John would have suspected that it had been purchased if he hadn't seen Sherlock knitting it last week.

"Oh Sherlock," Mrs. Hudson coos. "It's lovely."

"Only the best for you, Mrs. Hudson."

Seeing this, Mrs. Hudson with Sherlock's handiwork draped over her shoulders and Sherlock with a soft, proud smile, it does things to the inside of John's stomach. Ties it into knots, to be precise. God, it's foolish to hope, but he hasn't spent any time to knit with Sherlock in the past few weeks and if it's Sherlock he surely could have finished something else along with a shawl.

Mrs. Hudson glances at the time. "Oh dear, I was supposed to drop by Mrs. Turner's ten minutes ago. She must be wondering where I went off to."

John helps Mrs. Hudson carry her new tea set downstairs and makes sure she's not too tipsy to take proper care of herself. She seems almost sober, which is a feat considering that she drank more wine than John and Sherlock combined.

"Now, you two boys enjoy the rest of your night." Mrs. Hudson winks and kisses John's cheek.

John doesn’t start his strip upstairs until he’s sure he’s not blushing. Once he takes the first step, he forces himself not to stop until he’s all the way back in 221B.

Once he’s inside, the first thing he notices is Sherlock, relaxed and laid back against the black leather of his chair. The second thing is the red and white parcel on Sherlock’s lap. The third is the green-wrapped box on John’s chair. The parcel on Sherlock’s lap is the one John wrapped up last night.

John grins. “Impatient, were you?”

Sherlock makes a jerky motion at John to go sit. “Open yours.”

John walks over to his chair and sinks into it, hefting the green box as he does so. “Already deduced yours?”

“Obvious.” Sherlock takes his time taking apart the wrapping paper, careful not to rip at the hastily taped edges. “You were determined to finish your project before Christmas, which you achieved two nights ago. You haven’t given it to anybody else yet, though, because I saw it yesterday morning and you didn’t leave the flat with any large items lately. Ergo, it’s mine. Your scarf: grey, one hundred percent acrylic, stockinette stitch. Twenty-eight stitches wide. The first six rows have horribly inconsistent tension and you missed a stitch in the eleventh row.”

“Wrong,” John breathes, and he looks down at the opened box. “Jesus, you bought me a camera.”

“Oh, yes.” Sherlock is momentarily distracted from dissecting his wrapping paper. “You wanted one for the cases. This one is much more compact than the DSLR we used for the Connie Prince case, but the quality would be just as good. Sony just entered the mirrorless camera market. Quite adequate.”

Oh God, quite adequate by Sherlockian terms means that John will not be able to look Sherlock in the eye for a week or so if he finds out how much it costs. Knowing Sherlock, the posh bastard, he probably bought the costliest new gadget he could look up online.

“Sherlock…” He doesn’t know what to do. He wants to say that he can’t accept such an extravagant gift. He wants to say that it’s lovely, but it isn’t what he really wanted. Poor John Watson, can’t handle having expensive new electronics thrown at him for free. “I, well. Thank you.”

It’s stupid. It’s so stupid and maybe almost selfish, but John would have gladly traded this for a flimsy sock that Sherlock made.

John is so utterly gone and his flatmate doesn’t even _notice._

“Oh.” Sherlock’s voice is soft, and John is done for and it’s too late.

In Sherlock’s hands is a thick scarf, the same shade of purple as the indecently tight purple shirt Sherlock wears often on warmer days. It’s John’s favorite shirt, and Sherlock will know now, how often John watches the buttons strain across Sherlock’s chest and _wants._

“Fifty percent acrylic and fifty percent wool, one by one ribbing. Twenty stitches wide.” John clears his throat. “The ribbing doesn’t show very well, though.”

“I’ll teach you how to block.” Sherlock’s eyes are riveted to the purple yarn, his hands running over stitches as if mesmerized. “Thicker yarn, which explains how you finished it so quickly. During breaks at work where I wouldn’t notice. The other one, it was a _decoy_.” He says the last word the way he says _serial killer_ or _puzzle_. It makes John’s blood burn.

“It was more of a warm-up at first,” John admits. “Couldn’t give you my shit first attempt, after all.”

Sherlock looks up at that. “Where is the other one?”

“In my room; where else? It’s not like I have anybody else.” John tries not to sound bitter about this. For Sherlock, the end results don’t matter. It’s not Sherlock’s fault.

Sherlock stares at John. Long fingers still clutch at thick yarn, and John looks at those fingers and remembers the number of times he saw those fingers curled around knitting needles, making something new, choosing others at random to take whatever he produced but never choosing John.

John looks down at his lap and tries to unclench his fingers, tries to think of something to say. He’s given it away, shown his hand to his best friend who doesn’t want John like that, and now it’s all so obvious, in the painstakingly even stitches in the purple yarn, in the way John has confessed that for him there’s just Sherlock. Only Sherlock.

There is a clatter, and John looks up to see Sherlock, still holding the scarf, disappearing into his room without a backwards glance. There’s no scathing comment, no awkward speech about being married to the work, no words at all. Nothing. That’s it.

This is how it ends, then.

John curls forward, pressing a hand to his face. He doesn’t want to fall apart just because of this, something so trivial and stupid. Except it’s not trivial. Not at all. It was about wanting to know more about Sherlock that became wanting Sherlock, and now Sherlock had found out and left.

He just thought that maybe…what? That Sherlock might reciprocate? Care? Show a sign that John was more than just some placeholder to pay the rent?

John is an _idiot._

The sound of Sherlock rushing back snaps John back to the present and he looks up just in time to have a maroon lump thrown at him.

“I couldn’t.” Sherlock sounds panicked and pained and furious all at once. “I couldn’t make anything work. I tried, I was trying, but nothing worked. I kept trying but nothing was good enough, because for you it had to be perfect, I wanted it to be perfect. But I couldn’t find anything that worked, and this has never happened to me before. I’ve never gone through so much yarn in so little time, not before you. It’s ridiculous.”

On John’s lap is a jumper and John has never seen it before, in any stage of its creation, but he knows who made it. He knows what Sherlock’s fingers would have looked like wrapped in loops of thin, soft yarn. The neat rows of stitches make John’s head spin.

“So you’re saying you knitted things for me.” Something clicks. “You started knitting more because you wanted to give me something. Not because you were distracted.”

“Of course it was for you, why else would I have been knitting nearly every day in my spare time?” Sherlock throws his hands up in the air and he’s so overly dramatic, with John’s scarf hanging from his neck and swaying with the movement. John wants to kiss him. “I am not some toddler with a limited attention span. I was trying to find the right results, and it was maddening. I had to cut down on experiments to make more time.”

This is everything John has ever wanted to hear from Sherlock Holmes. How this brilliant man has rearranged parts of his life just for John, switched his priorities for an ordinary army doctor just because he thinks John deserves something perfect, something from Sherlock. John wants to give that to Sherlock too, something perfect, something to show just how much he thinks Sherlock deserves the absolute best.

Before he can think better of it, John pulls off his Christmas jumper in one smooth motion. He hears Sherlock make a strangled noise, and John grins so wide his jaw might crack. He stands and shoves his head in through the neck of the jumper, then pulls on the sleeves. The brush of warm fingertips above his waist makes his heart skip a beat, and he watches Sherlock tug down the hems of the jumper, smoothing it down and sending tingling sensations through John’s skins right to his spine. Sherlock tugs John closer to the kitchen to see him in a better light.

The jumper is snug, not constricting but flattering to John’s form, stretching nicely around his biceps in particular. He’s not surprised at how Sherlock has somehow tailored the whole thing to fit John so well. It’s a deep maroon hue, one of John’s favorite colours to wear, and it’s so obvious that Sherlock made this for John, just John. It makes John absolutely giddy.

“Like what you see?” He dares to ask.

Sherlock circles John in brusque steps, his gaze clinical. “Passable, but I feel that I could do better.” He blinks once, twice, twists his lips into a flat grimace. “Do you like it?”

“Like it? I love it, Sherlock. You made it for me.” John can’t sound any more besotted even if he tried.

“I.” Sherlock stops. Starts again. “I feel the same. About the scarf. Thank you.”

John takes a step towards Sherlock. “You’re welcome.”

Sherlock’s lips curve up into a smile. They’re nice lips. John wants to find out what they taste like. He watches one side quirk up.

“Does this mean I can bin your awful Christmas jumper?”

John snorts. “Berk.” He reaches out and pushes Sherlock a step back.

“No need to be so offended, John.” Sherlock laughs, and John wants him to laugh again, every day, every minute. For all he cares, Sherlock could just burn the damn thing if it means it will make him laugh more.

“You see but you don’t observe,” John chides. He steps into Sherlock’s personal space, just shy of full-body contact, and enjoys how quickly pale cheeks turns pink. He grabs both ends of the scarf, tugs Sherlock down a little. “You’re standing under the mistletoe.”

He presses his lips to Sherlock’s and lingers, drawing back slightly only to lean in again and tug Sherlock’s lower lip with his teeth. He sucks at it, takes his chance when Sherlock moans to slip his tongue in and make the kiss open and wet. Large hands clutch John’s sides and squeeze, making him lick Sherlock’s lips one last time and back off. Just as he thought, they taste marvelous.

Sherlock’s face is red, down to his neck and under his shirt collar. John wants to see how far down the blush goes.

“You’re perfect, you know,” John says in a low voice, stroking a thumb over a devastating cheekbone. He feels Sherlock’s breath against his mouth. “You don’t have to give me anything else. You’re more than enough.”

“Your ambitions could be greater,” Sherlock huffs with a laugh.

“Not really.” John nudges forward to taste Sherlock’s laughter. “Didn’t you know? You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

**Author's Note:**

> Notes and general comments about the fic can be found at divineprojectzero.tumblr.com/post/80565246216/


End file.
